Sabrina Carpenter in Coachella Review – The Insane Extremes of Pop Savant | Coachella

WHarking back to the good old days of spring 2024, pop singer Sabrina Carpenter ended her first set at Coachella with a bold promise: “He drinks my bath water like it’s red wine / Coachella, see you back here when I’m headlining,” she tweeted as part of the always moody closing lines of her song Nonsense. Carpenter is a popular performer — her music, full of double-entendres and funny one-liners, is as much musical comedy as pop — but it seems, for once, that she was dead serious. Just two years later, she returned to the desert as the calling card for this year’s opening night, tongue still firmly in cheek. “I can’t believe I’m going to be headlining Coachella!” She exclaimed to cheers, instantly melting into laughter – “Actually, I can… but it’s nicer to say it, isn’t it?”

The carpenter has reason to brag. It now seems that the days of chasing virality with bawdy nonsense are long gone. Her Coachella debut also marked the launch of a goofy song called Espresso that quickly turned everyone into caffeine-addicted “This Is Me,” and catapulted the diminutive pop star (“Oh, I made a good impression/Five feet, to be exact,” she purrs on the delicious “Taste”) into the pop music major leagues. Near-constant touring and two albums — the relatively no-skips Short n’ Sweet and B-side Man’s Best Friend — have cemented her status as one of pop’s consummate artists, churning out well-crafted, relentless songs at a pace not seen since perhaps Rihanna in the early 2010s. Bullshit, that song that first caught my attention in 2022, isn’t even on the 20-plus track list on Carpenter’s hugely ambitious set, which is… A bold flexibility in capacity and budget that declared its intentions to continue the first list.

She didn’t have a choice, really. Carpenter took the stage Friday, a year after Lady Gaga opened the festival with one of the best sets the desert has ever seen, a soaring pop opera that sets an impossible standard even for major pop stars of a generation below her. But Carpenter’s got a mission: If you’re going to headline Coachella, you better not only perform, but perform stageboth in terms of the elaborate world-building on stage and the cinematic videography, which is essential for everyone but the front row to see what’s happening. Might as well announce that the entire set, with a Hollywood Hills-style set that’s among the most impressive I’ve ever seen, is SABRINAWOOD, with capital letters in 4K vision as clear as the sound of Carpenter’s head.

Like Gagachella, Sabchella, as its fans came to regard it, is a stunning, large-scale hybrid production of bold vision that combines previously filmed chapter breaks with complex costume changes and immaculate performance, if not always a coherent plot. (Although it should be noted that the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe “plot” of a concert has already been mentioned above). The 26-year-old singer has been in the entertainment industry since she was a teenager, and gamely plays the ultimate showgirl in a touring production that takes a keen interest in many showgirls of the past. From the moment she steps out of a vintage car, resplendent in a red sequin dress, onto the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she doesn’t miss a beat. Petite, funny and always on point, Carpenter slips effortlessly into character: the classic, wide-eyed star reinventing herself in La La Land (a glossy House Tour version that borrows heavily from Damien Chazelle’s film); a likable ’70s star overseen by a male producer in the studio (highlighting “Please Please Please,” her vocals sultry like a bubble bath); The Overlooked Dancer (country fried Go Go juice, but make it Chicago); Burlesque star (a particularly seductive version of the chair dance from the fantasy anthem Bed Chem).

It’s enough complete changes and the dancing of an entire entourage to dazzle and confound, often at once. Like her friend and Eras tour mate Taylor Swift, Carpenter doesn’t seem to have a clear thesis on the life of a showgirl beyond living it, though I believe her when she says she put in seven months of dedicated work on Sabrinawood. Is the more the mentality tends toward exaggeration? maybe. While the rave-filled Espresso stage was exhilarating, I worry for the fans immersed in the car seat that doubles as a high chair that doubles as a fountain for the final number, Tears. Does the 90-minute collection demonstrate the thematic limitations of Carpenter’s body of work? Yes, even though it’s only been two years! And do the interludes, which star separately Will Ferrell and Susan Sarandon, with Samuel L. Jackson in voiceover, add anything other than time to change costumes and settings? Unfortunately not, although Sarandon’s six-minute(!) monologue about…something…is drowned out by microphone problems and desert winds.

I could have made one less change to avoid this noise, but that doesn’t matter either; The crazy production – Sam Elliott plays a cop in the lead, Feathers mixed with Barry Manilow’s Copacabana, that Broadway-worthy ensemble! – is more than most pop stars could ever dream of, let alone pull off, no matter how imperfectly. It helps that Carpenter, more often noted for her writing than her singing, sounded exceptional, her live voice more physical and full-bodied than her Bluebird recordings, though no less pure. She finished the set, overwhelmed and triumphant, in that car, heading toward the on-screen credits as if to close the loop on her movie stardom. No big promises were made with this finale, but rather the promises were delivered wonderfully.